Judgment day looms for papal contenders

Vatican City | With the terrifying grandeur of Michelangelo’s Judgment Day looming over them, senior leaders of the Roman Catholic Church will begin casting their ballots inside the Sistine Chapel on Tuesday to elect a successor to Benedict XVI, the first pope to resign in nearly 600 years.

No one campaigns for the papacy, at least overtly; the surest way for a candidate to disqualify himself from the job is to let it be known that he wants it. But names crop up repeatedly in discreet conversations as the 115 prelates eligible to vote try to figure out who is best placed to lead a historic but troubled institution that claims the allegiance of about 1.2 billion people.

Whoever emerges from the conclave as the 266th pontiff will inherit a global church that is: growing on far-off continents but waning in the Vatican’s backyard; challenged by other religions, notably Islam and evangelical Protestantism; unable to shake off a damaging scandal over clerical sexual abuse; and in the grip of a management crisis.

Although there is no clear front runner, the most frequently mentioned of the papabili – potential popes – come from a number of countries and have focused on various issues facing the church. In picking a new pope, cardinals will be choosing which of the church’s problems to tackle head-on.

From the moment Benedict announced his intention to retire, Angelo Scola has been considered a leading candidate to assume the throne of St Peter. Cardinal Scola, 71, is one of the senior Italians in the hierarchy. He’s Archbishop of Milan, Italy’s largest diocese, and a former patriarch of Venice; the two cities have produced five popes between them within the last century. Italians make up a quarter of the cardinals who will select a new pontiff, more than double those from the US and more than those from Africa, Asia and Australia combined.

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While Cardinal Scola has fostered dialogue with other religions, fellow Italian Gianfranco Ravasi has impressed some Vatican watchers with his engagement of atheists and agnostics and he is communications savvy. He keeps a blog, frequently updates his Facebook page and tweets with alacrity. Cardinal Ravasi, 70, recently informed his Twitter followers that he was pondering a lyric, “Love is a losing game," by the late singer
Amy Winehouse
(his verdict on her songs: “lacerating musically and thematically").

If the cardinals buck centuries of history and pick a non-European pontiff, then Marc Ouellet of Canada is one of the strongest contenders from the Americas, home to more Catholics than any other part of the world. Cardinal Ouellet, 68, once described being pope as a “nightmare" job that nobody would willingly pursue. His conservatism endears him to some prelates in Latin America. He speaks fluent Spanish and cites his time working in Colombia as a young priest as one of the most formative experiences of his life. In 2010, Benedict appointed him head of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.

But if Latin America is so important, some say, why not just have a new pope who is actually from there? A Brazilian of German descent, Odilo Pedro Scherer is Archbishop of Sao Paulo, the biggest Catholic diocese in the most populous Catholic country. About 40 per cent of Catholics live in Latin America, and some clerics there have pointedly said the time is right for a Latin American shepherd of the flock.

At 63, Cardinal Scherer would fit the bill for a younger, more vigorous pope to succeed 85-year-old Benedict. He’s no stranger to the Vatican, where he served for several years in the department overseeing bishop selection before returning to Brazil.

However, he is viewed by some as competent but not charismatic enough, in the conventional sense, to be the next pope, unable to electrify crowds and connect with the public as John Paul II did; a veteran Vatican watcher described him as “docile and bland".